Juniper Networks Updates Its "Hacker Deceiving" Web Security Software

Juniper Networks today announced enhancements to its Mykonos Web Security Software, the platform it acquired as part of its $80 million acquisition of security startup Mykonos Software in February of this year.

The Mykonos platform uses what the company calls “Intrusion Deception Technology”, that uses deception to detect and confuse attackers and help defend against web-based threats in real-time.

Juniper says the latest release of Mykonos Web Security brings 30 new features and improvements that bolster protection against a wider range of attackers and hacking techniques, simplify configuration for security administrators, and boost scalability.

Speaking with SecurityWeekearlier this year, David Koretz, now Vice President and General Manager of Junpiter-owned Mykonos Software, compared the solution to choose your own adventure stories read by young-adults. “For example, we will actually block the real .htaccess file, and return a fake one that look like a perfectly valid file, along with user names and encrypted passwords,” Kortez said. “It will even let [attackers] login to a fake recover password file, making the attackers think they have had success but in essence just burning up their time.”

According to the company, Mykonos Web Security now detects a wider range of attacks and hacking techniques, protects against more threats, and provides new countermeasures, including:

• Preventing brute-force authentication attacks that rapidly guess combinations of usernames and passwords to gain access to systems. Mykonos Web Security prevents the attacker from using any compromised credentials even if an attacker happens to 'guess' the correct password.

• Defending against directory traversal attempts that are used to map websites to gain additional information on how to attack them.

• Integrating third-party software vulnerability protection into Mykonos Web Security, which helps prevent against known software vulnerabilities typically targeted by automated attack scripts. Mykonos Web Security now integrates a large library of known third-party attack data into its tracking, profiling, and response systems.

The new version also brings a new and improvided user interface that unifies the security console and configuration, making it easier for customers to manage systems, and offers a setup wizard to quickly self-deploy the solution.

Additionally, the new release offers improved performance clustering, now supporting throughput over 1Gb/s by enabling customers to add multiple slaves to a clustering model.

"Web-based threats have become a major concern and companies require a proactive solution with real-time prevention to augment traditional-network security defenses,” Koretz said. “We can track, profile and, most importantly, respond to an attacker before the damage is done."

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring and analyzing trends in the enterprise IT security space and the threat landscape. In his role at SecurityWeek he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and manages several leading security conferences.